Homonormativity's Racial Capitalism: On the Differential Allocation of Grievability

This essay argues that racial capitalism in East Asia requires and reproduces a hierarchical reading of gender‐nonconforming bodies and desires, while the rise of a homonormative discourse finds expression in racialized violence against Chinese‐identified subjects. These entanglements preclude an analysis of Taiwan's geostrategic role in a US‐led regime of capital accumulation and dispossession. Shifting the conversation from a celebratory view of Taiwan's LGBT legal and civic victories to homonationalism's complicities with racial capitalism, this essay considers memoirs of survivors of the Chinese Civil War as articulating an alternative and unintelligible order of queer kinship rooted in the differential allocation of grievability.